I read a great story the other day that made me think, are we in control of how lucky we are?
"Years ago, Gary Player, the golf legend, was practicing in a bunker and an onlooker approached just in time to see him hole a sand shot. The onlooker yelled, "Fifty bucks if you do that again," and Player stepped up and holed the second shot. The guy yelled, "OK, $100 if you do it again." Sure enough, the third shot went in. As he was paying up, the onlooker said, "I've never seen anyone so lucky in my entire life," to which Player replied, "Well, the more I practice the luckier I get!"
Interestingly, luck is defined as "success or failure apparently brought by chance rather than through one's own actions"1.
Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, has identified the four basic principles2 that lucky people use to create good fortune in their life.
- Maximise Chance Opportunities - Lucky people are skilled at creating, noticing and acting upon chance opportunities. They do this in various ways, including networking, adopting a relaxed attitude to life and by being open to new experiences.
- Listening to Lucky Hunches - Lucky people make effective decisions by listening to their intuition and gut feelings. In addition, they take steps to actively boost their intuitive abilities by, for example, meditating and clearing their mind of other thoughts.
- Expect Good Fortune - Lucky people are certain that the future is going to be full of good fortune. These expectations become self-fulfilling prophecies by helping lucky people persist in the face of failure, and shape their interactions with others in a positive way.
- Turn Bad Luck to Good - Lucky people employ various psychological techniques to cope with, and often even thrive upon, the ill fortune that comes their way. For example, they spontaneously imagine how things could have been worse, do not dwell on ill fortune, and take control of the situation.
If you want to be a lucky person, take the steps to live the life you want to live.
1 Oxford Dictionaries
2 Richard Wiseman - The Psychology of Luck